Doing FPV with a quadcopter or a wing is fun but cars, it’s a different level of fun.
First as they aren’t flying up there you can relax and just enjoy the ride.

So I picked my Traxxas E-Revo VXL 1/16th and loaded the FPV gear in it. I had done this before but using
900Mhz video transmitter was greatly reducing the range of the radio. Same as it happens with multicopters
and FrSky.
As I have now 5.8Ghz video gear I decided to try that, I wasn’t too sure of the results because the 5.8Ghz not been
the best frequency to use when there is obstacles around. Stil the result was quite impressive taken in account I was
running in a park where trees, benches and old sorts of obstacles exist.

Started making the first tests of the MicroQuad for FPV.
The mod to the keychain camera really make it much cleaner and easy to install. I’ve made a cable for it that not only grabs the video out signal but also powers the camera.

At the moment as vTX I’m using a 1.2Ghz TX (20mW or so) that I had from a really old kit. It doesn’t provide a way to swap the channel but as it is super light it was the right choice for the MicroQuad. Still I was a bit disappointed with the performance, variations in voltage and temperature make it shift the frequency and loosing image quality.

Next stepp will try and find a 5.8Ghz TX to get better performance and range.

To prove that it works heres the video:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7znVsR75TVc[/youtube]

Ignore the video quality as it was a very cloudy day and at 4pm there is almost no light. The image in the goggles was pretty clear and comparing with a GoPro it was actually very good.

Thumbs up for the latest 0.58 FW for the #16 keychain that allows video out with a aspect ratio of 4:3 that fills the full image on the goggles.

Impression as well as the lack of vibrations seen in the video, for such a small frame and running the 1811’s that are far from the the best motors (actually is possible to hear one running badly) the vibrations noticed were minimal.

This new version 0.4.9 was basically to fix the pAlarm settings. Previoslly it was not setting the value
and the available range was not correct.

It now has a range of 0 – 5000 (this is expressed in mAh).

Have in mind that for this to work on the Mwc code it needs to be enabled if not the system will ignore
any value you try to set. One other note is that it used a scale value (default is 50) so the system will round
all values to multiples of this.

One of the features I wanted to add was GPS support.
But I only use Promini Arduinos, those only have one serial port making it impossible to add
a normal GPS. The solution is to use it over I2C.

The I2C converter is nothing more that a minimal arduino, composed of a ATMega328.
This brings several advantages, one the obvious of been able to have GPS support when using a
Promini, the others that it allows to move the GPS data processing into the I2C so releasing
main IC from the GPS work. As well as it will have extra space for features like WayPoint navigation.

I decided to get the one available at RCTimer.

The GPS I also opt for the one they sell that is a breakout board for the u-Blox Neo-6M. Supposelly a good GPS in terms of accuracy. So far it seems to have only one disadvantage that is it misses a EEPROM. So data is losts when it powers down.

The board comes with a backup battery, but a MS621FE providing 50mah is nothing and soon it will loose the settings.
There is some workaround for this that I’ll detail soon along with the process to add it to a BOB MWC shield as well as how to configure the software.

A user at RCGroups reported that version 2.0 was not working.
After checking I found a simple error introduced on last updates but
that was preventing the data from been processed for this particular version.

So this release contains the fix to it as well as some other small fixes that
were waiting to be released.